CiSRA thoughts
All right, all right, I should get these down on metaphorical paper. I'm going to talk freely about the answers to the puzzles, so if that bothers you, go do the puzzles first or something.
A lot of these puzzles were fairly clever, really. I liked most of Round 1: "Snip" was very easy, "Derivation" was quite clever, "Entitlements" was a basically good idea that got a little rocky in places (I'm not really convinced that Chief Bromden was the one who flew over the cuckoo's nest).
In Group 2, I thought Reciprocity was fairly easy, Meet Your Match was fairly clever, Coherency was just irritating. Then there's Magical Mystery Tour. There's a lot I liked in this puzzle; in was in fact fun to work out the songs and artists. Even at that point, though, there are a few places an editor could have stepped in-for instance, to point out that if you're doing a puzzle around single-named musicians like Enya and Sting, it's not really accurate to include "Elvis" and "Kylie" and "Britney", who didn't actually record as one-named singers. And that cluing Kylie with her cover of a Little Eva song is a particularly bad idea. And while we're at it: the depiction of Rihanna's "Disturbia" isn't especially good.
At any rate, that wasn't really the problem with the puzzle. The problems with the puzzle are that, first, though the answer says "it is possible to narrow down the possible values of the empty cells to specific numbers", it is in fact not; it's possible to narrow down the values to a rather large set of possibilities, unless I missed something really fundamental. EDIT: I did in fact miss something fundamental, as Joe pointed out below, namely that the diagonals constrain the possibilities much further. I stand corrected.
And second-and this is the much bigger problem-the puzzle about one-named singers yields the clue phrase WHO SHOT JOHN. All right, the four teams who tried variations on "Lee Harvey Oswald" can probably be forgiven, but I suppose it makes sense to assume, given the title, that the John in question is John Lennon. But when the question is "Who shot John?", the answer is "Mark", which 21 teams tried and were told was wrong. And 29 teams were told that "Chapman" was wrong; and 18 teams were told that "Mark Chapman" was wrong. The answer-pardon me, the format they were looking for was "Mark David Chapman". And that's just irritating.
That put me in something of a bad frame of mind for the remainder of the hunt. So in Round 3, after dashing off the rather easy word search (I feel like there was a decent idea in there that needed a better execution than "dump these things into a word search"), I didn't have a lot of patience for things that weren't quite working out. Raindrops actually worked out close enough that I didn't mind it, and Systeme International was probably basically fine (not that "2dp" is an especially clear way of saying "to two decimal places") except that I made a transcription error at some point.
But oh, Cranial Cryptics, aka "We have to do something in each round that's just stupid". As puzzle ideas go-two words clued, one's a hat, one's a hat with a letter removed-it was basically fine, though once again there were some particular cluing problems. (Why use "Michael Jackson" to clue BAD, especially when Michael Jackson has a noteworthy hat? And is putting "admires a drystone wall" somewhere in the clue really a good way to indicate "and drop the word 'mortar' from the hat name"?) But once again, the fundamental problem was that, given no constraint on what the answer would be and no particular constraint on the answer phrase other than what letters you can pull out of a hat, they decided to go with QUIET WOMEN as a clue phrase for WIMPLE, the headgear worn by nuns. Really? Seriously? I tried "wimples" because they made "women" plural; lots of teams tried "veil" or "veils"; I saw that I wasn't the only one who considered "burqa" (though I didn't try it).... Kath suggested "nuns", which is why I tried "wimples", but even then I didn't really like it. This is just a terrible clue.
Group 4 had Frownies, to which I said, "Enh", and Higher Calling, where I decided I just didn't care enough to solve a five-dimensional tic-tac-toe problem. Then there were White Elephant and Date With Destiny, both of which fall into the aforementioned "If your puzzle idea doesn't quite work, maybe you're better off not doing it rather than doing it badly." They weren't bad, per se. But in White Elephant, I assume that the thought process was: "I'll do anagrams of zodiac signs plus a letter. Oh, hell, Capricorn and Sagittarius don't work. OK, for Capricorn, I'll add two letters, and for Sagittarius, I'll drop a letter instead." I mean, I solved it without a problem, mostly because "scorpion" and "aquariums" stood out (once again, if two of your twelve words don't really have a good option....), but that doesn't make the puzzle a good idea. Similarly, Date With Destiny...well, I have mixed feelings. It's kind of a good idea. And then again, it's kind of irritating that they managed to pick a day-and-year that worked with different months (the 11th in 1554), and that one of their "death by beheading" people was a samurai who committed seppuku. Once again, though, the main problem I had was that, when they needed a message that could be spelled with the first letters of months except for two letters, they hacked it so that one of those two letters would come from a French Revolution month and the other would come from a French Revolution year.
Finally, Round 5. I was annoyed enough that I got partway through All Sorts and lost interest, and decided I didn't care enough to even start Already Taken. And Bodybuilding was fine. And then Headless Snake... I can tell that this puzzle wanted to be a good idea. But the clues were just so bad! First of all, to get the prefixes into the clues typically required adding a word that sent the clue veering in weird directions, e.g. including "big" in the clue for (bi)TE, so that half a bite was clued as "To press one row of teeth into a big object". Big? What? Even setting that aside, though: "unique" was clued as a noun, "regular" was clued as a verb, "precise" was clued as a verb, "anticipated" was clued as a noun, "important" was clued as a noun, and "Sanskrit" was just clued weirdly. (Also: since "disgruntled" really was formed as "dis + gruntle", it's not a particularly clever back-formation.) Then, to top it all off-changing from one-named musicians to John Lennon is one thing, but having a puzzle based on missing prefixes end by, to quote the hint for the puzzle, "removing the suffix, rather than the prefix"-that's just shoddy.
Oh, and the metapuzzle. As I remarked to Kath, "It's like a metapuzzle, but without the 'meta'! Oh, also, without the 'puzzle'." There wasn't really anything "meta" to it; solving each puzzle gave you a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, which you assemble. Which made it not all that puzzling either; more irritating, really, as I sat there rotating pieces with a graphics editor and trying to work around the gaps in my image. The final answer was...well, it was just another random answer, with no unifying theme, nothing clever, just another word.
So, overall impression: There were a few nice standalone puzzles here and there, but overall I'm glad I didn't put too much time in it, and kind of sorry I put in as much as I did.
A lot of these puzzles were fairly clever, really. I liked most of Round 1: "Snip" was very easy, "Derivation" was quite clever, "Entitlements" was a basically good idea that got a little rocky in places (I'm not really convinced that Chief Bromden was the one who flew over the cuckoo's nest).
In Group 2, I thought Reciprocity was fairly easy, Meet Your Match was fairly clever, Coherency was just irritating. Then there's Magical Mystery Tour. There's a lot I liked in this puzzle; in was in fact fun to work out the songs and artists. Even at that point, though, there are a few places an editor could have stepped in-for instance, to point out that if you're doing a puzzle around single-named musicians like Enya and Sting, it's not really accurate to include "Elvis" and "Kylie" and "Britney", who didn't actually record as one-named singers. And that cluing Kylie with her cover of a Little Eva song is a particularly bad idea. And while we're at it: the depiction of Rihanna's "Disturbia" isn't especially good.
At any rate, that wasn't really the problem with the puzzle. The problems with the puzzle are that, first, though the answer says "it is possible to narrow down the possible values of the empty cells to specific numbers", it is in fact not; it's possible to narrow down the values to a rather large set of possibilities, unless I missed something really fundamental. EDIT: I did in fact miss something fundamental, as Joe pointed out below, namely that the diagonals constrain the possibilities much further. I stand corrected.
And second-and this is the much bigger problem-the puzzle about one-named singers yields the clue phrase WHO SHOT JOHN. All right, the four teams who tried variations on "Lee Harvey Oswald" can probably be forgiven, but I suppose it makes sense to assume, given the title, that the John in question is John Lennon. But when the question is "Who shot John?", the answer is "Mark", which 21 teams tried and were told was wrong. And 29 teams were told that "Chapman" was wrong; and 18 teams were told that "Mark Chapman" was wrong. The answer-pardon me, the format they were looking for was "Mark David Chapman". And that's just irritating.
That put me in something of a bad frame of mind for the remainder of the hunt. So in Round 3, after dashing off the rather easy word search (I feel like there was a decent idea in there that needed a better execution than "dump these things into a word search"), I didn't have a lot of patience for things that weren't quite working out. Raindrops actually worked out close enough that I didn't mind it, and Systeme International was probably basically fine (not that "2dp" is an especially clear way of saying "to two decimal places") except that I made a transcription error at some point.
But oh, Cranial Cryptics, aka "We have to do something in each round that's just stupid". As puzzle ideas go-two words clued, one's a hat, one's a hat with a letter removed-it was basically fine, though once again there were some particular cluing problems. (Why use "Michael Jackson" to clue BAD, especially when Michael Jackson has a noteworthy hat? And is putting "admires a drystone wall" somewhere in the clue really a good way to indicate "and drop the word 'mortar' from the hat name"?) But once again, the fundamental problem was that, given no constraint on what the answer would be and no particular constraint on the answer phrase other than what letters you can pull out of a hat, they decided to go with QUIET WOMEN as a clue phrase for WIMPLE, the headgear worn by nuns. Really? Seriously? I tried "wimples" because they made "women" plural; lots of teams tried "veil" or "veils"; I saw that I wasn't the only one who considered "burqa" (though I didn't try it).... Kath suggested "nuns", which is why I tried "wimples", but even then I didn't really like it. This is just a terrible clue.
Group 4 had Frownies, to which I said, "Enh", and Higher Calling, where I decided I just didn't care enough to solve a five-dimensional tic-tac-toe problem. Then there were White Elephant and Date With Destiny, both of which fall into the aforementioned "If your puzzle idea doesn't quite work, maybe you're better off not doing it rather than doing it badly." They weren't bad, per se. But in White Elephant, I assume that the thought process was: "I'll do anagrams of zodiac signs plus a letter. Oh, hell, Capricorn and Sagittarius don't work. OK, for Capricorn, I'll add two letters, and for Sagittarius, I'll drop a letter instead." I mean, I solved it without a problem, mostly because "scorpion" and "aquariums" stood out (once again, if two of your twelve words don't really have a good option....), but that doesn't make the puzzle a good idea. Similarly, Date With Destiny...well, I have mixed feelings. It's kind of a good idea. And then again, it's kind of irritating that they managed to pick a day-and-year that worked with different months (the 11th in 1554), and that one of their "death by beheading" people was a samurai who committed seppuku. Once again, though, the main problem I had was that, when they needed a message that could be spelled with the first letters of months except for two letters, they hacked it so that one of those two letters would come from a French Revolution month and the other would come from a French Revolution year.
Finally, Round 5. I was annoyed enough that I got partway through All Sorts and lost interest, and decided I didn't care enough to even start Already Taken. And Bodybuilding was fine. And then Headless Snake... I can tell that this puzzle wanted to be a good idea. But the clues were just so bad! First of all, to get the prefixes into the clues typically required adding a word that sent the clue veering in weird directions, e.g. including "big" in the clue for (bi)TE, so that half a bite was clued as "To press one row of teeth into a big object". Big? What? Even setting that aside, though: "unique" was clued as a noun, "regular" was clued as a verb, "precise" was clued as a verb, "anticipated" was clued as a noun, "important" was clued as a noun, and "Sanskrit" was just clued weirdly. (Also: since "disgruntled" really was formed as "dis + gruntle", it's not a particularly clever back-formation.) Then, to top it all off-changing from one-named musicians to John Lennon is one thing, but having a puzzle based on missing prefixes end by, to quote the hint for the puzzle, "removing the suffix, rather than the prefix"-that's just shoddy.
Oh, and the metapuzzle. As I remarked to Kath, "It's like a metapuzzle, but without the 'meta'! Oh, also, without the 'puzzle'." There wasn't really anything "meta" to it; solving each puzzle gave you a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, which you assemble. Which made it not all that puzzling either; more irritating, really, as I sat there rotating pieces with a graphics editor and trying to work around the gaps in my image. The final answer was...well, it was just another random answer, with no unifying theme, nothing clever, just another word.
So, overall impression: There were a few nice standalone puzzles here and there, but overall I'm glad I didn't put too much time in it, and kind of sorry I put in as much as I did.